A peek at the life, times and thoughts of John during his two-year stint in Knoxville.

It looked like the weather was very favorable today. I don't think I set foot outside the house...but I did get some reading done, and that was very much needed.

Hebrew continues to be a struggle, but this is only the second week. If I had flawless recall, I would probably remember Greek taking some time to not feel like a 2-hour beat down each session. I am starting to recognize characters and transliterate more quickly and this will make things go much more smoothly...I hope. Some improvement was made today after working through an exercise in the book.

I still have a load of laundry sitting in the dryer. It's been there for hours now. I hope it's actually dry.

There have been times in my life when I drink pop after an extended abstinence from it and notice something about the taste I hadn't when I was a regular consumer. This is starting to be the case with television. I do not watch much television anymore. So, imagine my surprise when I turn on the TV yesterday and am able to clearly see what I hadn't paid much attention to when I watched it all the time: the extent to which sex is used to sell things.

Don't mistake me: I've known for a *long* time that sex is used to sell things. It was, however, surprising to see an advertisement for orange juice that was trying to use sex appeal. Weren't the ads with a 1/2 gallon box of ice cream as the pool boy bad enough?